The Secret Lives of Bats: The adventures of the real batman

THE biggest secret in Merlin Tuttle’s thrill-filled account of his bat-obsessed life is how he survived to tell his amazing tales. Tuttle is a legend in bat circles and this very personal and highly entertaining account of his experiences over the past five decades reveals why.

In The Secret Lives of Bats, Tuttle recounts his globe-trotting adventures in pursuit of these maligned animals. Nothing, it seems, can deter him – not even shotgun-toting moonshiners in Tennessee, spear-waving bandits in Kenya or rival bat-hunters in Thailand, who make their living poaching bats for the restaurant trade. He has narrowly escaped all manner of unpleasant deaths such as drowning and being trampled by a charging elephant, and suffered the destruction of a sizeable chunk of his lungs by ammonia rising from piles of bat dung.

But Tuttle is a legend for another reason too. He has probably done more than anyone else to change people’s attitudes towards bats, turning fear and loathing into fascination and respect.

Early on in his career, Tuttle became a man on a mission. As an ecologist, he wanted to find out more about the biology and behaviour of bats. As a conservationist – he founded Bat Conservation International in 1982 – he never passed up an opportunity to change the minds of people who think the only good bat is a dead bat.

As he explains, extolling the virtues of bats as vital pollinators and seed dispersers certainly helps. But show a potato grower bat droppings packed with the remains of their worst enemy, the Colorado potato beetle, and they are instantly persuaded. Point out how much money Texan farmers would save if they let bats control the pests that cost them most, and a whole state learns to love moth-devouring bats.

Tuttle never hectors. No matter how hardened a bat-hater he meets, he lays out the facts and lets them speak for themselves, sometimes even producing a small, cute bat as a convincer. But, as he points out, you can’t always have a bat with you. You can, however, change perceptions with a stunning photograph.

“You can’t always have a bat with you, but you can change perceptions with a stunning photograph”

Fed up with the usual scary images that accompanied most bat-related articles, Tuttle tried to find photographers to picture them in ways people would warm to – nurturing their young, pollinating flowers – and get action shots of them doing things never seen before. The problem was no one else was willing to subject themselves to the horrendous conditions in bat caves. So Tuttle took the task on himself. Some of his images have become world famous.

Best of all, though, are the book’s revelations about the bats themselves. Vampire bats have a social structure akin to that of primates, sharing food and information, adopting orphaned young and practising reciprocal altruism – something humans, chimps and wild dogs do. Frog-eating bats pinpoint their prey by their calls, and have evolved unique hearing that allows them to detect both the high-pitched squeaks of their echolocation system and the low-frequency sound of calling frogs.

Sadly, as Tuttle reminds us, bats are still demonised in some quarters. Last year, the government of New South Wales sanctioned the destruction of colonies of flying foxes. Why? In 1996, Hendra virus was discovered in Australia. It killed four horses a year on average and two people died after contracting the disease from horses. Fruit bats are the main host so they got the blame. But tests have shown the only animal capable of transmitting the virus to horses is the domestic cat. Tuttle’s work is not done yet.

Scroll through the gallery below to see some of Merlin Tuttle’s pictures: